Thursday, April 22, 2010

What the Hell, Arizona?

Arizona's bill orders immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and requires police to question people if there's reason to suspect they're in the United States illegally. It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them.

As a historian, I don't like to hear people say "If we don't learn history, we're doomed to repeat it." We learn history all the time, and still do much of the same, hateful stuff that's always been done.In reading the provisons of the bill, I wondered, how different was it from the Geary Act of 1892:

The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit, a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year at hard labor.

coordinated 1075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies, to mount an aggressive crackdown, going as far as police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people in a region with many Native Americans and native Hispanics

Historical comparisons are not the only things circulating in my mind, though. The point is this law codifies racial-profiling and harrassment and criminalization of Latino/as (because, really? what is likely to be the basis for "suspect[ing] they're in the United States illegally"?). Isabel Garcia, an Arizona legal defender, offered this description:

[T]his bill represents the most dangerous precedent in this country, violating all of our due process rights... We have not seen this kind of legislation since the Jim Crow laws. And targeting our communities, it is the single ... largest attack on our communities.